Civil Service Reform Act of 1978

Civil Service Reform Act of 1978

Long title	An Act to reform the civil service laws.
Enacted by	the 95th United States Congress
Effective	October 13, 1978
Citations
Public law	95-454
Statutes at Large	92 Stat. 1111
Codification
Titles amended	5 U.S.C.: Government Organization and Employees
U.S.C. sections created	5 U.S.C. ch. 11
Legislative history
Introduced in the Senate as S. 2640 by Abraham A. Ribicoff (D-CT) on March 3, 1978 Committee consideration by Senate Governmental Affairs Passed the Senate on August 24, 1978 (87-1) Reported by the joint conference committee on October 4, 1978; agreed to by the Senate on October 4, 1978 (agreed) and by the House on October 6, 1978 (365-8) Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 13, 1978

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, (October 13, 1978, Pub.L. 95–454, 92 Stat. 1111) (CSRA), reformed the civil service of the United States federal government, partly in response to the Watergate scandal. The Act abolished the U.S. Civil Service Commission and distributed its functions primarily among three new agencies: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA).

The original legislation allowing federal employees to organize together and protect rights was the Lloyd–La Follette Act in 1912. However this act only allowed for employees unionize together and petition the government, but gave them no real bargaining power. The Act was amended by both President Kennedy (Executive Order 10988) and President Nixon (Executive Order 11491), but neither executive orders truly fixed the problems with the original act. By the time President Carter took office in 1977, the Lloyd-LaFollete Act was perceived as entirely obsolete and forced the necessity of legislative reform. With the American public wary of the organization of government following Watergate and the OPEC embargo, President Carter's time in office coincided with a period in which bureaucratic organization was open to "reexamination". Carter ran his campaign promising to "strengthen presidential control over federal services", and once in office created the CSRA. Carter intended for the act to create more bureaucratic officials involved with policy making (rather than administration) and that were more closely politically controlled by the presidency. The CSRA arose from a growing wariness of the United States Government by the general American population. Preceding the Act in 1978 was nearly a decade of major blunders committed by the White House. In short, the federal government had "widely over-promised and woefully underperformed". Incidents like the Watergate scandal coupled with the consensus public opinion of the Vietnam War being a complete failure led the push for reform. The CSRA sought to fix common problems across the public sector such as eliminating manipulation of the merit system without inhibiting the entire structure, how to both invest authority in managers while simultaneously protecting employee from said authority, limit unnecessary or excessive spending, and make the federal work force mirror the American people more closely.

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